Colorado Springs Fire

My sister sent me the following picture of the Colorado Springs fire. It’s about 10 miles from their house. CA commenter Pete H (also author of the handy WordPress unthreading plug-in and one of the major behind-the-scenes technical helpers to the blog) also lives in Colorado Springs.

For reference, the stadium visible in the bottom of the photo is Falcon Stadium, where the U.S Air Force football team plays. The stadium is about 4 miles south east of the main campus complex (off the right hand side of the photo).

Steve, you’re to blame for this. Without climategate and your gadfly pestering of climate scientists, copenhagen would have been a success, CO2 levels would have been lower, and this fire wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

With regard to this fire, the 6/29/12 Health and Science page of the magazine, “The Week,” has the following: “…the West is headed into a more fire-prone future, wildfire specialist Max Moritz tells the Los Angeles Times. After studying satellite imaging and data from 16 climate models, Moritz and other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that rising temperatures are likely to change fire patterns not just in the U.S., but across 80 percent of the planet by the end of the century…”

Several weeks ago, The Week reported, with a straight face, the story about dinosaurs farting causing global warming. They do something like this almost weekly. For a supposedly balanced magazine, their climate science page is about as unbalanced as it gets.

6pm MDT tonight: they just allowed a minority of the 32,000+ displaced residents to return home.

The fire is 10 percent contained, and not at all done with.

The most experienced wildfire teams were shocked by this one… what made it bad on Tuesday: a huge (dry) thunderhead dropped in place over the fire in a canyon. 55-65 mph winds whipped the fire to an inferno, then exploded burning material in every direction… up to half a mile away in an instant. It blew past every defensive boundary.

I am fortunate enough to be rather far to the east and not directly impacted. However, some friends were evacuated and another got to watch her own home burn to the ground on live tv (one of the first). Horrific is all I can call it. In spite of the tragedy, alarmists are already capitalizing on some ill-perceived connection to CAGW. They have no shame, nor couth.

Oh, my, it brings back memories of the mega-fire I was close to (the 2003 Canberra fire). At 3pm the sky went black – I couldn’t see across the street. It got that close.

Very best and most compassionate wishes to your sister, and her community. An event like that is very, very scary. It truly reminds us that we are just ants on this Earth when it comes to large scale natural events.

I also wish that people who believe in a gentle, caring, fragile Gaia would comprehend how an ant/human feels in the face of a firestorm (or volcanic eruption, tsunami, etc).

Please let us know how your sister and her community are going as this unfolds.

I can feel for the people having to feel helpless as their homes are threatened and even burned.

At the same time we have people who live in river bottom land, and very time their homes get flooded many people question why they built in flood-prone areas – and then get federal funds to rebuild their houses on the same homesites.

I grew up along the Mississippi across from St Louis. After the 1992 floods, the people of Valmeyer, Illinois decided enough was enough. They’d had horrendous flooding in 1973, and 1992 was just more than they could stand. They abandoned their flood-prone town location and began relocating on higher ground, up on the bluffs a mile to the east. Smart move.

I also lived a couple of years in Denver. For those who don’t know it, Denver is not up in the Rockies. Like Colorado Springs, it is on the plain. Both cities have expanded up into the foothills (which is what you see burning in the photo). But ALL of that – plains and foothills – is technically desert. And non-technically, too. Whenever I’ve been out there I’ve wondered why people would build in areas that are going to have forest fires, due to the aridity. It is like that all along the Front Range: desert with suburban living intermingled. It is a recipe for a disaster. This year their luck ran out, and they blame it on global warming – and they are wrong. Wildfires will happen there till the next millennium, s they have for thousands of years.

Not meaning to seem unfeeling, but how are the people building in fore4st fire areas any less sensible than people who build in flood plains?

The outcome of these fires will be that the people will rebuild on the same sites, funded by insurance companies and the feds. And then everyone will hold their breaths and hope it doesn’t happen again.

Re: feet2thefire (Jun 29 11:27),
This is a subject pertinent to Climate. There are both smart and dumb ways to build and live in a place that may be subject to disasters. Those who believe we should change the environment so there’s no need to adapt… generally fare less well than those who learn to adapt well.

By way of analogy: in California, we learned to build and live in ways that could withstand earthquakes. Bolts on the house foundation, bungees to protect valuables in the kitchen cabinets, etc. I’ve survived large earthquakes without trouble. In other parts of the world, even a small earthquake is a disaster.

More directly to your point: yes it is stupid for Home Owner Associations (HOA’s) to require fire-prone shake roofs. I suspect we’ll soon see a number of lawsuits because that’s exactly what some HOA’s used to require right here in Colorado Springs.

On the other hand, for many years it has been shown that proper fire-retardent roofing and siding, fire-resistant landscaping, and general good care, can enable one to build and live in peaceful coexistence with a forest. I suspect that most of the still-standing homes in the fire-ravaged areas will prove to have been properly adapted for that context.

There will always be exceptions. My roof is class IV fire and hail resistant. But if it were hit by four+ inch grapefruit-size hail, not only could the roof be destroyed, so could the plywood sheathing underneath.

“The outcome of these fires will be that the people will rebuild on the same sites, funded by insurance companies and the feds.”

As someone who lives near this fire, I pay very high fire insurance rates, probably rightfully so (even though I have a fire resistant roof). I know I don’t get any subsidy. I agree that people should pay for the risk they incur to live in a (usually beautiful) forest.

I still struggle to see how purported AGW would lead to these fires. Here in the Western US, a good bit of summer moisture possibility is due to tropical moisture. And more generally, overall moisture supply tends to be associated with El Nino and Positive Phase PDO. Well, we are now in a Negative Phase PDO and had a La Nina into the Spring. So of course drought conditions are wide spread. Cold NE Pacific = drought for all but the NW corner of the Western US. Been that way for eons.

Like many residents in C Springs, I saw the fire start to build on Sat, Jun 23. There were no signs at all at 10:30 AM, by 12:00 we could see a single plume like a large bonfire, by 1:30 PM it was a massive conflagration that continued to grow all afternoon despite quick response by the county.

I hope it turns out to be a bottle focusing the sun’s rays but fear the timing and lack of precursors indicate malicious origin. The matter is still under investigation while firefighters continue to battle the monster. The weather hadn’t cooperated which was why you saw the tremendous growth earlier this week; everyone says this will be studied for years to come due to the literally explosive growth caused by high winds.